


Restless Eyes Reveal My Troubled Soul.

by pearlydewdrop



Series: Cute, Dorky and a Wee Bit Mental (Collection of Random Derry Girls Stories!) [8]
Category: Derry Girls (TV)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Cousins, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Family Drama, Found Family, Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, Grandparents & Grandchildren, Grief/Mourning, Heartbreak, Love Stories, Motherhood, Multi-Era, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Sister-Sister Relationship, trigger warnings in the end notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29313999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearlydewdrop/pseuds/pearlydewdrop
Summary: "Restless eyes reveal my troubled soul, and memories flood my weary heart "~ Eleanor McEvoy, Only a Woman's Heart.A multi-generational story of a family remaining strong in the face of joy and tragedy. Told from the perspective of three separate generations of strong willed women, every bit as alike as they are different.
Relationships: Erin Quinn & Orla McCool, Gerry Quinn/Mary Quinn, James Maguire & Michelle Mallon, James Maguire/Erin Quinn, Joe McCool/Marie McCool, Mary Quinn & Deirdre Mallon, Mary Quinn & Sarah McCool, The Friendship Between All Five Derry Girls, The Quinn-McCool Family
Series: Cute, Dorky and a Wee Bit Mental (Collection of Random Derry Girls Stories!) [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2044645
Comments: 12
Kudos: 24





	Restless Eyes Reveal My Troubled Soul.

**Author's Note:**

> Important; this story DOES contain trigger warning that I haven't tagged on the outside of the work to avoid spoiling anyone. Since I don't want to upset anyone, If you feel the need to read these warnings beforehand, they're at the end of the chapter...bear in mind that some are more explicitly stated than others.

**Restless Eyes Reveal My Troubled Soul.**

_..._

_The tears that drip_   
_From my bewildered eyes_   
_Taste of bitter sweet romance_   
_You're still in my hopes_   
_You're still on my mind_   
_And even though I manage on my own_

_~Only a Woman's Heart, Eleanor McEvoy._

_..._

**1979**

"Gimme a light there, will ya Deirdre?", Mary asked, joining her friend of twenty years on the wall that ran along outside their front gardens.

She shivered involuntarily, pulling her pastel raincoat more tightly around her shoulders.

It was just after nine o' clock on a Saturday morning and the housing estate was coming to life with the sounds of young families and bored teenagers in search of some way to pass their time. The soldiers' armed jeeps had long since passed down the street, tightly patrolling the area for anything out of the ordinary.

Deirdre Mallon smirked teasingly, handing over her cigarette lighter with a flourish. She noted the dark circles beneath her friend's eyes, a clear and trustworthy sign of the early stages of motherhood if she ever saw one.

"Mary Quinn, are you pickin' up my bad habits? What'd yer Da say about that, eh? He'd be ragin'!"

"Ach, I need it!", Mary bit back instantly, her tone somewhat theatric as she gestured for the dark haired woman to bunch up and make room for her to sit down. "Erin's doin' my head in, so she is! I'm tellin' you, that wee'un can do the finest impression of a banshee I've ever heard!"

Since before sunrise, little Erin Quinn had insisted upon both her parents being up and out of bed —practically purple in the face in her attempts to break her very own freshly set record for the worldest loudest wail.

Laughing slightly, Deirdre shook her head at the comment. "Ach, don't talk to me! Conor and Ryan combined never caused as much hassle as Michelle. Ye'll get used to it, you and Gerry. Trust me..."

Mary smiled gratefully at the comment, genuinely a wee bit uncertain about the ins and outs of her newfound role but wanting her friend's words to be true.

For a moment they sat in silence, blue-white cigarette smoke filling up the air around them. The twisting tendrils curled from their nostrils, floating out of sight.

"Any of ye heard from Kathy lately?", Mary asked gently, knowing it was still a sensitive subject for Deirdre but still feeling genuinely concerned for the younger woman who'd left for England after finding herself in trouble.

"Not a peep...", Deirdre replied, taking another long drag from her cigarette. Pointedly avoiding Mary's eye, she didn't want to admit aloud that she was truly worried about Kathy.

The woman may have been a completely reckless and self-obsessed dose, but they were sisters first and foremost.

"...In fairness we all knew it would happen someday. It's her wee chap that I've got the real compassion for..."

Mary nodded in agreement, not wanting to push the matter further and upset her friend. "True enough...", she concurred, reaching out and patting the back of Deirdre's hand comfortingly.

Looking up once again after a moment or two, Deirdre seemed to have composed herself quick enough. "How's Sarah these days?", she asked, wanting a change of topic.

Mary huffed agitatedly, feeling and sounding like her own father but not caring in the slightest.

"Still engaged to the bastard anyway, wile so it is..."

Deirdre frowned. "Ye never warmed to him, did ye Mary?"

"He's just got somethin' fierce feckin' crafty about him", Mary explained, having already voiced her opinions on the matter to both Gerry and Deirdre to no avail. "...and Sarah doesn't even come 'round as often as she used to. To be honest, I'm gettin' a bit worr—"

Eyes leaving hers mid-sentence, Deirdre seemed to have spotted something over Mary's shoulder that amused her to no end. "Jesus, that poor fucker looks like he's seen a ghost!", she remarked, letting out a disjointed bark of laughter.

"Ach, Gerry! Can ya not watch her on yer own for two min—

The words died on Mary's lips as soon as she had properly turned around. At the sight of her husband, her scowl melted and her panicked heart immediately picked up its pace at the look on his face.

"—what's happened? Is Erin alrigh—"

"What's that wee girl done to ya now, Gerry?", Deirdre asked somewhat expectantly, still assuming that the whole situation had something to do with Erin.

_It didn't..._

Ignoring Deirdre's usual ribbing in its entirety, Gerry turned to his wife. His face was as white as a sheet and his eyes as wide as saucers.

"Erin's grand, Love. It's Sarah. She's been taken into hospital..."

* * *

Mary found herself reaching for Gerry's hand as they made their way through the corridors of Altnagelvin Hospital. The lights above them were white and harsh, their bulbs flickering and buzzing —merging almost seamlessly with the sounds of heart monitors and ventilators.

As they passed the nurse's station, the voice of some unidentifiable presenter crackled from the radio in the corner. . _..Reports confirm that The Provisional IRA have just claimed responsibility for a twenty three kilogram explosive detonated off the coast of Mullaghmore in the early hours of the morning. Among the dead are Lord Mountbatten, his grandson Nicholas Knatchbull and local teenager Paul Maxwell..._

"D'ya want me to come in with yeh?", Gerry asked once they had found themselves standing before the Accident and Emergency ward where they had already been told that they would find Sarah.

Although Gerry Quinn may have been deemed an out and out drip by the standards of most Derry residents, to Mary Quinn her husband was so much more than people believed. He was her constant, her touchstone, in the quiet times as well as amidst the daily chaos of their lives.

"She's yer sister too now, eh? ...well, sort of anyway."

In truth, Mary just wanted Gerry with her —wanted someone by her side as she faced whatever Eoin McNally had done to Sarah.

_That bloody bastard..._

Despite having already inherited her Da's fiercely protective streak, a different side of Mary Quinn _(the beginnings of a formidable matriarch, perhaps?)_ had begun rearing it's head in the weeks that followed the birth of her daughter, growing steadily alongside her fears that something truly horrible was happening to her younger sister.

As soon as she set foot inside the ward, Mary's eyes were drawn to those of Sarah's. For a split second she saw the little girl that she'd grown up alongside, the girl who'd always seen the very best in everyone —even if the only good to be found was something as superficial as a well chosen handbag or a pair of eyebrows worthy of compliment.

"A'right there, Sarah?", Mary asked almost conversationally, trying to peal her eyes away from the cuts and bruises on her sister's body.

A glass door had been slammed in Sarah's face, or so the doctors had told them when she and Gerry had arrived. They had plans to keep her overnight to observe her for any signs of a concussion. All going well, she'd be discharged by morning.

Sarah glanced up, her eyes glazed over and the blankets tugged up to her chest to cover her belly. She seemed to be trying to uphold a cheery exterior, avoiding the elephant in the room that had brought the three of them to the precarious place they had found themselves in.

"I look a right state, so I do. Nightmare, so it is..."

Approaching her carefully like one would a wounded animal, Mary sat down on the arm chair beside Sarah's bed. With a quiet nod in his wife's direction, Gerry left the two sisters for a moment to search for a stool.

"What happened, Love?", Mary asked, her voice low and dangerous—ready to tear the bastard who'd had the nerve to hurt her sister apart limb from limb. Reaching out to take her hand, her heart contracted painfully as Mary watched her sister flinch at the contact.

"Eoin was drinkin'", Sarah replied solidly, her eyes not quite meeting Mary's. "We got in a fight..."

Mary's eyes fell to Sarah's hand, a relived breath escaping her lips when she saw the pale band of skin that encircled her sister's ring finger—the mark left behind by fake tan applied haphazardly over the missing engagement ring's surface.

Sarah hadn't been herself for months, they both knew it.

"You've left him for good this time?"

"Aye, Mary. I have to. It's isn't just me that I'm mindin' anymore..."

It took a moment for Sarah's words to properly register with Mary and when they did she choked back a sob of understanding. "Yer expectin'?"

Sarah nodded resolutely, her determination shining bright and rendering all of her other injuries almost invisible by comparison. She seemed to have been preparing herself for this same conversation for weeks—even if she hadn't expected it to take place in a hospital bed.

"I am, aye. And I'll do a fine job on me own, so I will."

Mary smiled in agreement, her eyes filling with tears. In another life, she may have berated Sarah for her foolishness, for sticking around with a prick like Eoin McNally and getting herself in trouble.

...but Mary could have lost Sarah for good that morning or seen her leave for England, as Kathy Maguire had, only to be heard from once in a blue moon...

True, the road ahead wouldn't be an easy one, the taboos perpetrated by the Catholic Church about single motherhood had seen to that, but it took a village to raise a child. Their family, every bit as loving as they were proud, would be Sarah's village.

Reaching out once more, Sarah allowed it this time as Mary took her hand.

"Not all on yer own, Love..."

* * *

**1987**

He'd been quite the looker back in his day, her Joe.

_...Still was, if she was the one who was being asked._

Standing over the sink, Marie watched the antics of her husband and her youngest grandchild from the kitchen window. Little Orla McCool was all up to high doh on Flying Saucers, Fat Frog Ice Pops and Cadet, her bushy brown curls flying in every possible direction.

Standing on her adoring grandfather's toes, the seven year old giggled excitedly as she waltzed with him around the back lawn, arms and legs going helter-skelter.

Marie felt a form in lump in her throat, her breath hitching at the familiar sight _...a sight that she'd surely miss._

It had been over thirty years since she'd first met Joe McCool, serving him up a pint at her Da's pub as he mouthed off about the Resistance Campaign and the rights of good Catholic people to their homes and freedom.

Bridie had only scoffed as she listened to their half-drunken ramblings, warning her younger sister that Joe was bound to land himself in the worst kind of trouble one of the days.

Marie had rebuked her for that, insistent that her fella wouldn't hurt a fly before reminding Bridie that imagining a world where their lot had more than the little they currently had was no crime by any measure of the yard stick.

With a flirtatious wink, Joe had promised faithfully never to break her heart that night... _Marie had never suspected that she would be the one to break his._

The years that followed had been some of their toughest, but also some of their best.

In the years following the end of the Second World War, Derry had been rife with unemployment —worse than it had ever been in their childhoods. Nevertheless, Mary and Joe had gotten on with life together, tightening their belts and wising up accordingly. As the desire for civil rights escalated in the Bogside and spread like wildfire across the rest of the city, their daughters had grown up and brought daughters of their own into the world.

_Christ, Marie hated the thought of leaving them all...she didn't want to._

She'd found a lump, you see, something that she had originally thought would just go away on its own but had since proven otherwise.

The cancer already having spread to her liver, the doctors had given her weeks to live...

"Ach Granny, surely Orla's dancin' isn't so bad that you'd be cryin!", a bossy little voice piped up from across the room, effectively drawing her out of her reviere.

Clearing her throat, Marie hastily wiped her eyes and turned to face Erin, her eldest grandchild by less than a year. The very picture of her daughter Mary at that age, the last thing in the world Marie wished to do was upset the girl with her tears.

Come hell or high water, their family stuck together. They shouldered their pain and sorrows side by side, tackling their burdens with heads held high.

It was a duty that would, one day, pass to Erin and Orla...

"Ah, Erin...don't be sayin' things like that about yer wee cousin! You girls have to mind each other out there in the big bad world, even if I won't always be around to remind ye."

Hearing her grandmother's words and misunderstanding their significance, Erin pulled an unconvinced face but nonetheless agreed. "A'right, Granny. If you say so..."

Marie shook her head in amusement, ruffling her fingers through a still scowling and sulking Erin's hair, smiling at the girl who clearly didn't appreciate being at the receiving end of such a childish gesture.

"Yer good girls, so ye are...most of the time anyway"

* * *

**2008**

A little pale and genuinely knackered, Erin tried to shake the dull achy throb that had clung to her stomach and lower back since earlier on that morning. The nausea came and went in ebbs and flows, gone for hours at a time before returning with a raging vengeance.

There were any number of things that she could have blamed her general _out-of-sortsness_ on...the cramps that the doctor had reassured her were perfectly normal, the stress of her impending deadline with her publisher or the ' _morning_ ' sickness that should have ( _in her opinion anyway!)_ recoinned itself as ' _morning, noon and night_ ' sickness.

Complaining aside, Erin Quinn was happy. Really really happy. Happier than she could ever remember being. Kylie Minogue's ' _Lucky_ ' came to mind, but even with all the Aussie's incessant harping on good fortune that doll didn't even begin to cover half of it.

Erin had a husband she loved with every fibre of her being, friends she would move mountains for in a heartbeat, a job she enjoyed, a book just weeks from publication and a healthy wee baby that was, according to her doctor, cooking nicely so far and ready to pop in five months time.

_They were lucky...so fecking lucky!_

"Are you alright?", James asked carefully, their sides brushing in the tiny kitchen of their two bedroomed flat.

His hands settled on the broad of her back, the same warm and steadying presence as he had always been for her.

Erin nodded determinedly, huffing out a shaky breath, as though to dispell the lingering after effects of the pain. She offered James a small reassuring smile over her shoulder.

As much as Erin usually enjoyed her ever attentive husband's hovering, the girls were currently congregated in their sitting room. Drowned out by affectionate bickering, the sound of Take That's newest song _'Rule the World_ ' played in the background.

_Just like the nineties...except completely different_

It was the first time all five of them were under the same roof in weeks.

Clare had been up to her eyes with charity work overseas and Orla's ever expanding Step Aerobics empire was, as Sarah had rightly predicted, taking the world completely by storm.

Living less than an hour away, Michelle was the one that Erin and James usually saw the most of. Still every bit as much of a head wrecker as she'd always been, the Mallon family's only daughter had taken everyone by surprise by trading her teenaged delinquency for a law degree, an absolutely clinker car and a court full of hardened criminals who shook to their very core at the mere mention of her. _Loose grasp of the law no more!_

They had done well for themselves in their twenty nine years of knocking about, all five of them...

Erin huffed out a slightly snorty laugh and laced James's fingers with her own, placing them over the still small but definitely noticeable swell of her stomach.

"He's probably just havin' a wee bit of sulk for himself."

James's frown eased somewhat, a wide lopsided smile gracing his features upon hearing her words.

It was a look full of boyish wonder that reminded Erin of a much younger James - a look that took her right back to adorable beaming prom dates in stripy Doctor Who scarves, sneaking off to Belfast to see Gary Barlow live and the prospect of going away to France to practice the past participle.

"You're so sure that they'll be a boy!"

Erin smirked triumphantly, wounding her arms purposefully around her husband's neck. "Damn right, I'm sure!", she lorded smugly, leaning in until her and James's noses were touching.

There was no one else in the whole wide world who she could possibly imagine going on this journey with... _A baby! They were going to be parents!_

Call it a Mammy's intuition or just a good old fashioned hunch but Erin Quinn had a strong feeling that her wee'un was a little boy and she wasn't having anyone tell her otherwise.

"He's a picky eater like his Da and buzzes off remindin' me of it every ten minutes."

His eyes glinting in jest, James laughed aloud. It was a sound that, even after eleven years together, never once failed to give Erin butterflies.

"If he's causing that much trouble, he's definitely a lot more like his mum than me."

Erin barely managed a eyeroll at the comment before James's lips descended upon her own, stealing her breath away. She smiled into his mouth, her fingers caught up in his curls in less than an instant. It felt like home.

Suddenly the kitchen door crashed open—

"Fuck's Sake, Lads!", Michelle grumbled at the sight that greeted her, watching impatiently as her cousin and best mate slowly pulled apart from one another. "When I was promised grub, I didn't think I was bein' invited around to watch ye eatin' the faces off each other...bloody mingin', it is."

_Sure enough, some things never change..._

James and Erin exchanged cheeky Cheshire Cat grins, the embarrassment of being caught in an intimate moment having worn off ages ago.

After all, a year and a half of sharing an apartment in London with Orla McCool would definitely do that to a couple.

"She had something in her eye", James excused, his eyes alight with mischief.

For the first since entering the kitchen, he was reminded of why he had sought out Erin in the first place. The handwritten lists had been out, comprises on numbers were ready for the making and Orla had already jotted down more than half of the menu. They just begun the devisive and painstaking process of ordering food and James had come to ask what Erin wanted.

However, his darling wife had once again proven that she had quite the talent for distracting him, not that James was complaining in the slightest...

Michelle smirked at the daft explanation. "What like yer tongue?"

Erin scoffed, drawing herself up primly. "Ach, that's very mature, Michelle!", she replied, sounding every bit as bossy and self important as her sixteen year old self had been.

Flouncing out the kitchen door, Michelle let out a bark of laughter in response.

"Lighten up, will ya? I'm only takin the piss'!"

As his cousin made her exit, James returned his gaze to a huffing Erin with their arms still hung loosely around one another.

"Do you fancy anything in particular?", he asked, the question coaxing a smile from her.

Erin chuckled softly. "Y'mean aside from my cracker hubby?", she asked, eyebrows raised teasingly.

James smiled, every so slightly sheepish. "Well..."

A flirty progesterone and oestrogen addled Erin and a James who was very much in awe of his pregnant wife was a wonderful, mad and chaotic mix...

"...nothin' too greasy and we should be grand", Erin confirmed with a wink, removing herself from Jame's embrace before either of them went in for another snog. They both knew that goofing around as they were was just a wee bit rude. Even if the prospect of annoying Michelle further was a truly tempting one.

James nodded as he let go, playfully saluting her.

"Nothing Greasy", he promised, reminded of Erin's loud and theatrical devastation several weeks earlier when her sense of smell went haywire and food from their nearest chippy genuinely started to make her shudder.

As much as Erin loved the odd Fish n' Chips, their unborn baby had promptly decided that such deep fried delicacies were a no-no from the get-go. An insult to their ancestors who'd survived the potatoe famine, she's accused their wee'un half-jokingly.

"Yer a star, James Maguire!", Erin replied, reaching up to give him a grateful peck on the cheek before they wandered back out to rejoin their friends.

Apparently still listening from the sitting room, Michelle piped up once again with a further ( _typically eyeroll inducing!)_ comment.

"Jesus Christ, Erin! No chips! What's that cousin of mine done to ya!", she demanded, fixing both of them with a piercing look that was, in equal parts, proud and accusatory _. Classic Michelle!_

"...but I s'ppose there's no denyin' who the wee'un's Da is, eh there Jamesie?"

"Honestly Michelle..."

* * *

It. Was. Excruciating...

Erin gripped tightly to the arm of the couch, tuning out a hungry Michelle and Clare's conversation as they wondered aloud when Orla and James would return. Her knuckles paled, her head spun and she saw stars.

They were white and blinding.

The pain started up once again in her stomach, sharp and tugging this time— almost like something deep inside her had given away. It wasn't like anything she had ever felt before, rendering the cramps her doctor had dismissed in the weeks prior a papercut by comparison. Her belly was hard beneath her fingers and her mind immediately filled with dread.

 _Oh no...oh no...oh please no...no...no..n_ —

Erin wasn't sure if a sound had managed to escape her lips, but Clare and Michelle's wide and worried eyes were on hers in an instant. She gulped back tears, struggling to her feet and mindlessly stumbled for the bathroom as she felt her pants dampen.

In the back of her mind, Erin registered Michelle and Clare calling out to her but, in that moment, she may as well have been in a world of her own.

Shutting the door behind her, Erin fumbled with the buttons and zipper on her jeans. Her fingers shook violently and her stomach turned in horror as it recognised the smell.

_Oh no..._

In the time it had taken her to get to the bathroom, her knickers had been almost completely soaked through. Her thighs were stained bright and violent crimson.

Coppery. Tangy.

Blood.

...

"Pick up yer fuckin' phone, James!", Michelle snapped, fingers tapping against the steering wheel as she caught Clare's eye in the rear view mirror.

The stupid nicknames and the slagging tone were long gone, replaced instead with in-control exterior that barely masked the genuine panic that Michelle Mallon felt for one of her best mates, her cousin and her wee nephew.

Erin sat beside Clare in the back, head guided gently into her friend's tense and shaking shoulder. She felt the smaller blonde woman's fingers in her hair and heard shushing noises that were clearly meant to calm both of them but managed no such thing. They were both nervous wrecks...

Her body was clotting and contracting and Erin didn't know what to do. She felt her own helpless tears fall, stinging her already sore and bloodshot eyes.

True, it was agony...but nothing could rival the storm of emotion she felt inside.

Erin was desperate to cling to the slightest remaining hope that her baby would be okay...no matter how unlikely. The grief came in tides like the contractions, ripping her apart inside. One hand cradling her stomach, she could scarcely tell if the mantra she was repeating was audible to the others or just inside her own head.

"Yer not to go! Yer not to leave us...yer not!"

In that moment, she wanted James. She wanted her own Ma.

And damn it, Erin wanted nothing more than for her unborn son to be okay!

Torn between sobbing and screaming, she gripped tighter to Clare's hand as the pain wracked through her body once again.

Erin barely bit back a whimper as Michelle offered her a weak and wavering smile, phone still squeezed between her ear and shoulder.

"Ye'll both be a'right, ya hear me? Just grand."

Forcing out a nod in response, Erin couldn't for the life of her stop the salty tears from streaming into her hair.

* * *

_'Be careful, child, of the doll made of glass. For if you hold her too tightly, she will break and you will bleed.'_

Hopped up on painkillers, the words of her amateurish teenaged poetry ran circles around Erin's mind. They haunted her, teased her.

Everything had been so much easier back then... _so fecking simple._

The hospital was cold and clinical, totally jammers with life but somehow completely desolate at the same time. It felt absolutely nothing like the warm apartment that the five of them had been lazing around in just hours earlier —chatting and arguing, crossed with laughter and love.

James, _bless him_ , hadn't left her side for a moment in the hours that passed. Even now, he took her hand and slipped himself into the empty spaces between her fingers. He'd told her how strong she was, how brave she was and how much he loved her.

Erin didn't feel strong or brave.

"C'mere?", she asked quietly after some time, her voice cracking and vunerable from hours of screaming and silence. It usually took quite a lot to silence her but _this_...this had.

Erin shuffled over in the hospital bed, making room for him by her side.

By her side — it was exactly where James belonged... _where their son had belonged too._

She needed to feel something that wasn't the aching grief nestled down inside her...rooted somewhere deep beneath her breastbone. Erin had never believed in heartbreak as a physical ailment until that day...now she wished she'd never been so unfortunate to find out at all.

James eyed her carefully, his eyes every bit as bloodshot and his nose every bit as blotchy as hers. While their whole family and all their friends would be devastated by the tragedy that had occurred, this was their loss first and foremost.

"I don't want to hurt you, Erin."

"You'd never!", she insisted firmly.

Erin wasn't a glass doll...even if she was broken, just as James was.

Without another word, he stood up and cuddled in behind her on the narrow hospital bed. Determined not cause her any more pain, James's arms wrapped tentatively around his wife's fragile and aching frame.

It was only then, with their bodies pressed tightly against one another, that Erin felt her husband's tears. One by one, they fell upon their tangled fingers that she held close to her chest.

Her heart thumped against her and James's intertwined hands, still alive and still beating with love for him and for their son who hadn't made it...

_Christ, it still didn't feel real..._

A boy. Erin had been right all along. The doctors had confirmed it when they'd offered her and James their condolences, alongside some other quite difficult news. Even then, it was hard to believe that a love like theirs may struggle to produce a child in the future.

"I love you so much."

"Love you too..."

Erin and James's thoughts unknowingly travelled to the same place; to dreams of a happy healthy little boy with blonde curls and green eyes. One who would have had (in addition to his adoring parents), the most wonderful grandparents, a fiercely protective great-granda and the barmiest band of aunts imaginable.

Together they envisioned the life of a little boy who would have grown up listening to his mother's nightly convoluted bedtime stories and watching TV shows with his father about talking hoovers who plotted to take over the planet. Ten years since The Good Friday Agreement had been signed , their son would have lived a life where The Troubles, as his parents remembered them, would no longer trouble his generation.

"How do you feel?", James asked after a moment, releasing a shaky breath against her ear.

Erin choked out an exhausted sigh at the question, a question that encapsulated so much and so little at the same time.

"In bits", she replied honestly, stroking his thumb as a small and unspoken means of comforting both of them. She was in bits...physically and emotionally.

James nodded, feeling the same broken hopeless numbness that she described. As always, Erin's words hit the nail right on the head.

"We'll put each other back together, won't we?", he asked hoarsely, carefully tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear and squeezing her fingers gently. "With time?"

She nodded. "We will, aye. With time."

* * *

After having fallen into a deep and fretful sleep, Erin sensed someone settle beside her in bed. Their movements were not quite as subtle and careful as James's when he'd left for the bathroom moments earlier and the sudden change in her surroundings caused her to startle awake —only relaxing at the familiar sight that met her when she opened her eyes.

 _Orla_.

Awake once more, the reality of her situation hit Erin full force like an incoming bus. Her grief returned in tides all over again and she bit down on the inside of her already raw and blistered cheek, barely recoiling as the taste of her own blood filled her mouth.

Erin felt Orla's rather bony chin nestle into her shoulder, arms instinctively snaking around her like they were two little girls all over again. She felt her cousin's eyelashes against her cheek, sensing the sweep of each and every owlish blink.

"He's an angel now, so he is...", Orla said softly, oddly perceptive in her own way as always. "Like Granny..."

Erin frowned slightly at the comment, not sure if she believed in any of that _religion stuff_ anymore...

Needless to say though, the thought of someone she'd loved as much as her Granny McCool looking after her and James's wee son when they couldn't anymore was an unexpected comfort. 

Instead of saying anything in reply, Erin squeezed Orla's fingers gratefully—a unspoken response that more than sufficed for both of them.

Side by side, the two cousins lay awake and exhausted until the others in their little wolf pack returned, listening to the sound of each other breathe.

_..._

_When restless eyes_   
_Reveal my troubled soul_   
_And memories flood my weary heart_

_I mourn for my dreams_   
_I mourn for my wasted love_   
_And while I know that I'll survive_

_My heart is low_   
_my heart is so low_   
_As only a woman's heart can be_

_~Only a Woman's Heart, Eleanor McEvoy._

...

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings; domestic violence, cancer, miscarriage and fertility issues.


End file.
